Sunday, May 31, 2015

What sort of DevOps are you?

What sort of DevOps are you? Can you even define DevOps?

Nobody
really knows what DevOps is, there are almost as many definitions as
practitioners. Part of the problem is that the name tends to get tacked onto anything to make it seem trendy. (The same way that "cloud" has been abused.)

Whilst stereotypical, I tend to separate the field into
the puritans and the pragmatists.

The puritanical vision of
DevOps is summarized by the mantra of "Infrastructure as Code". In this
world, it's all about tooling (often, although not exclusively, based around configuration
management).

From the pragmatist viewpoint, it's rather
about driving organizational and cultural change to enable people to
work together to benefit the business, instead of competing with each
other to benefit their own department or themselves. This is largely a
reaction to legacy departmental silos that simply toss tasks over the
wall to each other.

I'm firmly in the pragmatist camp.
Tooling helps, but you can use all the tools in the world badly if you
don't have the correct philosophy and culture.

I
see a lot of emphasis being placed on tooling. Partly this is because
in the vendor space, tooling is all there is - vendors frame the
discussion in terms of how tooling (in particular, their tool) can
improve your business. I don't have a problem with vendors doing this,
they have to sell stuff after all, but I regard conflating their
offerings with DevOps in the large, or even defining DevOps as a discipline, as misleading at best.

Another worrying
trend (I'm seeing an awful lot of this from recruiters, not necessarily practitioners)
is the stereotypical notion that DevOps is still about getting rid of
legacy operations and having developers carry the pager. This again
starts out in terms of a conflict between Dev and Ops and, rather than
resolving it by combining forces, simply throws one half of the team
away.

Where I do see a real problem is that smaller organizations
might start out with only developers, and then struggle to adopt
operational practices. Those of us with a background in operations need
to find a way to integrate with development-led teams and organizations.
(The same problem arises when you have a subversive development team in
a large business that's going round the back of traditional operations,
and eventually find that they need operational support.)

I was encouraged that the recent DOXLON meetup had a couple of really interestingtalks about culture. Practitioners know that this is important, we really need to get the word out.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

"Nobody really knows what DevOps is"

I do actually, since it is not rocket science: the mantra is "hack it 'till it works, when it longer scales, employ a program like Chef or Puppet to continue to hack system configurations on a mass-scale, and under every and any circumstances stay away from encapsulating configuration management into OS packages", the latter with OS packages is because the fine gentlemen are incapable of designing frameworks and processes to make configuration with OS packaging scale.

Oh, and while we are at it, let us not forget that the aforementioned DevOps gentlemen have no concept of change management, or process design.

About Me

I've followed a circuitous (but not uncommon) route into systems administration, with a degree in Physics and a doctorate in theoretical astrophysics.
For many years I've been around the Solaris, OpenSolaris, and illumos communities, and now have my own distribution - Tribblix.